"I'm licensed to sleigh!"

Spending Christmas halfway across the world became far less lonely for Amanda Kendle when she was invited on the adventure of a lifetime.

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For once, I wasn’t homesick on Christmas Day. Back in Perth, some 13,000 kilometres away, my family would be finishing their traditionally excessive Christmas lunch of prawns, quiches and salads. I missed them, but this year I was spending the festive season in northern Finland, literally dashing through the snow on an open sleigh. Like so many Australians do during their 20s, I’d left home to live abroad for a few years, teaching English in Japan, Slovakia and Germany. Homesickness only hit for two reasons: I was sick, or it was Christmas. The airfares were too expensive to fly back to Australia for the short teaching breaks in December, but during my stint in Germany I realised I might forget my sorrow if I arranged the kind of Christmas I only knew about from singing wintry carols and seeing snowy scenes on wrapping paper.

Some quick internet research told me Santa lived on the Arctic Circle in Finland. That was enough for my boyfriend and I to book flights to Helsinki. I also went shopping for thermal underwear and extra-thick socks, realising there’d be no temperatures above zero that Christmas.

In mid-December, after a 10-hour train journey north from Helsinki, we arrived in Rovaniemi, just shy of the Arctic Circle. For a week, we immersed ourselves in activities many Australians only ever see on TV snowshoe walking, driving a snowmobile and ice fishing, to name a few, and all done in the midday dusk of a northern Finland winter, when the sun never properly rises.